Warning: Your Attention is Under Siege

So I'm watching "Morning Joe" while running on my treadmill this morning and Mika Brezezinski asks her co-host Joe Scarborough a question. He looks at her blankly. This is live television. Then he acknowledges that he was distracted by something that appeared on the iPad on his desk.

He's not alone.

Do you find your mind wandering at times when people address you?

Do you frequently switch from one activity to another?

Do you have difficulty sustaining attention on a task and are you easily distracted by what's going on around you?

Do you struggle to prioritize and organize activities?

Do you dislike having to do work that requires really intense concentration?

If you were honest, my guess is you answered yes to the majority of those questions -- and perhaps to all of them. They also happen to be five of the key symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Who doesn't suffer from them, to one degree or another? What task did you just interrupt to read this blog, for example?

Back in 1971 - the digital dark ages before cell phones, email, Google and the Internet - Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon saw the tsunami coming. "What information consumes is rather obvious," he wrote, presciently. "It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

We're just beginning to recognize that multitasking isn't a solution. The brain is incapable of doing two cognitive tasks at the same time. Instead, it moves back and forth between tasks, sometimes giving us the illusion that we're paying attention to both, when in fact we're missing what's going on in one so long as we're doing the other.

Text while you're driving and you're 23 times as likely to have an accident.

In short, we're absorbing less and less of more and more. When we split our attention between multiple activities - or interrupt ourselves frequently -- we lose access to essential details, but also to nuance, subtlety, texture, detail, depth and richness.

Consider the remarkably common practice of checking and sending emails during meetings, or on conference calls.

"Not everything that's being said is relevant to me," one client told me, recently. "I get the gist."

"How would you know that?" I replied.

The vast majority of clients tell me they have no choice but to interrupt themselves frequently. The expectation is that they'll reply to emails instantly.

Here's the problem: the research suggests that when you shift your attention from a primary task to take on another one - say answering an email - you're increasing the time it will take to finish the initial task by an average of 25 percent.

Make no mistake: there's something seductive and even addictive about the instant gratification that all the new technologies make possible. But there is also a profound difference between pleasure and satisfaction.

Pleasure is cheap. A cheeseburger or a couple of martinis will do the trick. But pleasure doesn't last very long. Satisfaction requires a more significant investment of effort—often to the point of discomfort. The payoff, however, is deeper and more enduring.

Gaining control of our attention - the ability to put it where we want it, and keep it there for sustained periods of time -- is a prerequisite to a satisfying life.

Attention is like any other muscle. It grows weaker with disuse. The more we interrupt ourselves, the more distractible we become. But it also gets stronger by training it systematically.

Here are four practices that will help you gain more control of your attention - and your life:

* Do the most important thing first every morning, without interruptions, for at least 60 to 90 minutes. It's the ideal way to take charge of your agenda, and get the most challenging work done, with the highest efficiency.

* Chunk your email, meaning answer it in batches, rather than continuously through the day. Set aside at least some periods where you turn it off altogether.

* Take short breaks throughout the day - 2 to 3 minutes at first - to close your eyes and practice quieting your mind. Breathe in through your nose to a count of three and out through your mouth to a count of six. The more relaxed you become, the easier it is to focus and the stronger your attentional control will get over time.

* As an antidote to surfing the web and churning out emails, texts and tweets, take at least one uninterrupted half an hour in the evening to read a challenging book, or to think reflectively and write in a journal about your day.